


the weight of living

by belovedmuerto



Series: Keep You Like An Oath [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Timestamp, WWII, soulmates!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t really be Steve. Not his little Stevie, his soulmate, his best friend, the tiny guy with the crooked back and the bum ticker and the lousy lungs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the weight of living

**Author's Note:**

> Here, have this thing I wrote in the space of about a day this week. I think it counts as a timestamp, as it happens during the first fic in the Keep You Like an Oath series? I think? I dunno. 
> 
> Thanks to Moonblossom for reading it over.

He didn’t believe it at first, the ache in his chest drowned out by all the other shit: the table and the needles and the questions and the water and the starvation and the sparks they’d made in his brain. He doesn’t start believing it until after Steve-- _STEVE_ \-- had made that impossible leap and survived it, stumbled a few steps and shaken it off like it was nothing, that impossible leap, wrapped an arm around his waist and had dragged him, practically carried him out of the exploding factory/prison camp as it all came crashing down around the ears.

_What the fuck, Steve?!_

It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t really be Steve. Not his little Stevie, his soulmate, his best friend, the tiny guy with the crooked back and the bum ticker and the lousy lungs.

Not this guy, this hulking Adonis, this paragon of masculine perfection. This man that all of the survivors are looking up to, are looking to for guidance. 

Bucky doesn’t believe it until after they’ve all started walking, banded together by Captain America ( _seriously, Steve? A fucking_ shield _?_ ), who is at his side, glancing at him all nervous-like out of the corner of his eye. Bucky’s got one of the HYDRA guns now, and he’s only limping a little bit, and his breath comes a little easier with each one he draws, and he can hear the others strung out behind them, some on the tanks, most walking or helping others. 

One by one, the guys he’d been sharing a cell with come up to him and Steve ( _STEVE. Jesus._ ), and they are clapping him on the back and saying glad to see ya Sarge and making jokes about him being Captain America’s damsel. Dernier says something in French that Bucky only gets the gist of, but it’s gentle ribbing all the same, with a wink and a nod that he doesn’t understand and pretends not to see, because he’s been around the Frenchman long enough to get it, even if he doesn’t really get it.

It _is_ Steve.

What the ever-loving fuck.

This can’t be real.

\----

He’s still certain that none of this is real when Steve calls a halt for the night. It’s become fairly obvious that they aren’t being followed, that these woods are deserted, no man’s land. Azzano was the only thing around, isolated in the forest, and there’s no one left to follow them, to try and take them back now that the factory is destroyed. 

They all group together and work to make something resembling a camp. There’s not much in the way of supplies or food or shelter, but they’re all used to that by now. What little they do have goes to the sickest, the frailest amongst them, the guys most of them are at least a little bit certain aren’t going to make it back. One last pleasure, a bite of food, a friend singing softly in one ear.

There are no fires. There aren’t really any tents.

When things are quiet enough, settled into the silence of the night, Bucky stands and starts walking. He picks his way amongst the sleeping forms of the others, towards the edges of the camp. He doesn’t need to go far, only far enough that no one will hear him, before he lets the thing sitting in his lungs out. Just far enough.

He doesn’t know exactly where Steve is, somewhere on watch. Of course he’d volunteered to take first watch. He’d insisted on Bucky getting some rest, and Bucky had relented, although he knew even then that he wouldn’t sleep that night. 

He’s not sure he’ll ever really sleep again.

Camp peters out into the denseness of the forest, and he picks his way along silently, avoiding branches and shrubs he’s not even sure he’s seeing. It’s cold, but he doesn’t really feel it.

Eventually he decides he's far enough away, and he ducks behind a tree, pulling his ratty sweater over his head. He sinks down to a crouch against the tree, feeling the roughness of the bark scratching against the abrasions on his back. He tells himself that this means this is real. It means that he's awake and he's not under the "care" of those people anymore.

Carefully, he rolls the sweater into a ball. He presses it against his face. And he screams. He screams and he screams and he screams, muffled in the scratchy, smelly fabric, until his voice is cracked and hoarse and the searing heat of his own tears has registered and the sound of someone crashing through the woods in his direction breaks through his panicked thoughts and he jerks his head up with a noise between a gasp and a sob.

Steve is standing there, and for a brief moment he looks small and terrified, and Bucky shakes his head to dispel the image because Steve can't be here. Steve couldn't enlist, not with his laundry list of ailments and Steve is safe at home in New York--

Or not.

"Bucky? I heard--" Steve shakes his head, and Bucky stares across the small distance between himself and this new version of the same old stupid-headed stubborn ass that is his best friend. There’s probably something like horror on his face. Something like fear in his eyes, like shame in the heat on his cheeks, but right this very moment, he doesn’t care.

He might be imagining all of this but it's still welcome when Steve lurches across those last few feet and yanks him to his feet, pulling him into a rough hug.

"Jesus, Buck, you're like ice. How long you been out here without a shirt on?"

"Dunno," Bucky mumbles, shrugging and burrowing into the furnace warmth of this new Steve. "Not even sure I'm actually here."

“‘Course you are,” Steve answers, voice rough with emotion. “I wouldn’ta walked into fucking Austria to find you if you weren’t. Promise.” He rubs his hands up and down Bucky’s back, his arms, trying to restore warmth to him. It stings when he rubs against the abrasions and the healing cuts, but Bucky welcomes it. Pain is reality.

Bucky still doesn’t really feel the cold. He stands leaning against Steve, into him, and lets himself be held, be coddled and warmed. Eventually, Steve lets go enough to take his sweater out of his hand, where it’s still rolled into a ball, and help him put it back on. He peers at Bucky’s face for a minute, tries to catch his eye, and then gives up and pulls him back into his arms.

Bucky lets him. Here in this little clearing, surrounded by silent forest and the small sounds of sleeping soldiers nearby, he lets himself be coddled by his soulmate, and it’s the way his chest doesn’t ache with missing Steve anymore that finally starts to convince him this might all be happening.

He might not be on that table anymore. Maybe they really did all break free.

“What’d they do to you, Stevie?” he mumbles, after a minute or an eternity, into Steve’s shoulder. 

Steve is taller than him now. He’s all muscle and furnace heat and height. It’s so strange.

He feels Steve shrug, and feels him tighten his arms. Bucky does the same, turns to tuck his nose against the warmth of Steve’s neck. He smells the same, at least, under the leather and wool of his jacket and the weird red, white, and blue sweater he’s got on.

“I’m better now,” Steve says, eventually. Mumbles really, and somehow the declaration isn’t quite one. It’s almost a question.

And Bucky hates to contradict him, but, “You were perfect before, you lunkhead.”

Steve doesn’t reply, but Bucky feels him huff against his shoulder. 

“I can breathe easy now,” Steve says, eventually. Long enough later that it isn’t a reply. It’s an admission.

Still, Bucky wonders if he means that literally, that his lungs aren’t so lousy anymore, or if it means Steve has missed him as much as he’s missed Steve. He wonders if it means that it’s easier to draw breath with Bucky near him. The way Bucky is finding it so much easier to breathe now that Steve is here.

Steve is really here.

This seems to be actually real.

“I don’t have a heart murmur anymore,” Steve mumbles. He’s starting to sound defensive.

Bucky twists in Steve’s arms so he can press his ear to Steve’s chest, and Steve lets him do it. He holds still and loosens his hold so Bucky can listen to his heart. He listens and listens and listens to the lub dub of Steve’s heart thumping along, and it’s true that the tiny extra lub that was always there is gone, and Steve’s heart is steady and strong and Jesus ain’t that something.

Bucky pulls back to glare up at Steve, because this really is something, and Steve is a complete moron because there’s no way this was just ordinary medicine, because if it was ordinary medicine that shit would’ve fixed him up good and proper when he was still a kid.

And ordinary medicine doesn’t make a man grow a foot overnight. This was something hinky and of course Steve goes off and does this shit as soon as Bucky lets him out of his sight.

“Don’t think we aren’t going to have a serious talk about your stupidity, Steve,” Bucky hisses, even as he’s manhandling Steve, turning him around and yanking his jacket off his shoulders, down to his elbows so he can press his ear to Steve’s back.

“Breathe,” he orders, and Steve obeys.

Steve breathes deep, and breathes deep, and breathes deep, and Bucky listens to the way his lungs don’t sound like rasping and phlegminess and imminent pneumonia. They’re all sounds that Bucky has been used to, has grown up next to, and it’s strange, hearing none of them. 

He listens to Steve breathing for a long time, and Steve is patient beneath his ear, patient and breathing and not griping at him for once to let go, to leave him be. He can almost feel how Steve is pleased with himself, and pleased that Bucky is here to listen to his body working like a regular body, and Bucky hates it and loves it in equal measure.

Steve is patient with him until precisely the moment when he isn’t anymore, and he pulls away from Bucky’s ear and Bucky’s hands on his arms and turns around again, crowding into Bucky’s space, crowding him back against the tree, and Bucky goes even though for a moment everything in him wants to lash out because this person is a threat is trying to trap him and then Steve’s hands land on either side of his neck, big and gentle and just about the same as they always were, artist’s hands, long fingers and Bucky’s eyes shut of their own accord and he takes a deep, unsteady breath, and Steve’s forehead connects with his own, gentle, and everything in him goes absolutely still. Everything in him is still and calm and everything outside of him and Steve and the points of connection between them drops away, and his arms come up, and his fingers wrap around Steve’s wrists, and they breathe each other’s air, and Steve is making noises, soft ones, unhappy ones, and it hurts. 

It hurts like he’s been hurting for days, for weeks, ever since he’d left home and Steve, and he doesn’t want Steve to hurt, and he doesn’t want himself to hurt, so he makes shushing noises, and Steve goes quiet.

They are quiet, holding on to each other, neither of them trying to push away what they normally push away. It is intimate, the way Bucky for one is almost never willing to risk. But for now, surrounded by sleeping soldiers in this god-forsaken forest in Austria he’ll let himself have it. 

“I thought I’d lost you,” Steve murmurs, eventually, breaking the stillness between him.

Bucky takes another deep, shuddering breath. “I thought so, too.”

They fall back into silence, into matched breath and gentle hands, gentle holds, gentle tethers holding each of them in place, together. Bucky knows it’s coming, when Steve breaks the silence again. And he hates it, even though he expects it, because this is his Steve, and he knows Steve as well as he knows himself, if not better.

“You okay to head back to camp, Buck?” What Steve doesn’t add is that he’s been off watch too long and he needs to get back.

Bucky lifts his head and opens his eyes. Steve is still holding him, hands on either side of his neck, and Bucky lets go enough to pat at one of Steve’s wrists before nodding and stepping back.

“Yeah. You go ahead, gimme a minute. Okay?”

Steve smiles at him. “Okay Buck. Get some sleep.” He takes a step back, letting go of Bucky, and Bucky feels it like losing a limb, keenly. Steve turns and picks his way back towards camp, towards the perimeter he needs to be watching.

Bucky watches him go, heaves a sigh and just stands for a minute. _This is so fucked up._

He wraps his arms around himself, even though he still doesn’t really feel the cold, and heads back towards camp.

**Author's Note:**

> I've started working on the fic that comes after the whole series/first fic, but it's probably going to be a bit before I finish it.
> 
> In the meantime, feel free to come poke me/prompt me/yell about Bucky Barnes with me on [tumblr](belovedmuerto.tumblr.com).


End file.
